Known dermal fillers can be injected into a patient's body to augment soft tissue portions within the body. For example, some known filler compositions can be injected adjacent the urinary sphincter muscle to increase the volume of the tissue within the urinary tract to treat urinary incontinence. Known dermal fillers can also be injected into the skin to change the contour of and/or increase the volume of the skin. For example, known high viscosity compositions can be injected within facial skin to remove wrinkles, treat scars, or the like.
Some known procedures for injecting dermal fillers into a patient include injecting the dermal filler using a standard medical syringe. In such conventional medical syringes, a practitioner applies manual pressure to a plunger to force dermal filler from the syringe body. However, the force applied manually by a practitioner can be sporadic, leading to injection of more or less dermal filler at a particular location than desirable. In this regard, manual force may be insufficient to provide the desired flow rate of dermal filler into the patient. Practitioners may also develop user fatigue and/or chronic health problems such as arthritis by continuously applying enough manual force to actuate injection of the dermal filler.
Therefore, non-manual actuators have been developed for use with medical syringes as part of a medical injector, to avoid the aforementioned problems with manual actuation of a medical syringe. However, these non-manual actuators are currently specially designed for a corresponding or particular medical syringe. Consequently, the non-manual actuator must be replaced any time a different type of medical syringe is to be used to inject dermal filler or other liquids into a patient. Furthermore, the non-manual actuator may not maintain a fluid-tight connection with a medical syringe, which may lead to leaking of material from the syringe during actuation.
Thus, it would be desirable to provide an improved medical injector and an adapter that address at least some of these problems with conventional injection systems and syringes.